The Erratics

by Vicki Laveau-Harvie

I am at home in the fog. I have several names, like all operatives with successful trajectories, and I negotiate the fog under cover of one or the other. I don’t answer to any of them.

  I grow up with three first names in Canada where official documents allow only two. Three is uppity, punished by having to squish the third name in the margin and then getting your form refused as not standard. I take to pretending I do not have a third name, because it is twee, and because only my first two names matter.

  My first name is my mother’s first name.

  My middle name, the one I am known by when we are out to impress, is Victoire. It’s ceremonial. Victoire was Louis XV’s fifth daughter and is probably the one who actually said the poor should try eating cake. She was quoted out of context.

  Ah, here is Victoire, my mother says when I arrive home from school. She turns to the lady on the sofa and sets her teacup down, freeing her hands and smiling blindingly, back past her canines. Victoire is so fond of Henry James, she tells her guest.

  I rein myself in. I do not check over my shoulder to see if there is a simpering doppelganger hovering there, holding a paperback to her chest, someone my mother could like.

  I am not fond of Henry. I have not met him yet, and I won’t like him when I do.

  I am fourteen. The boys I like are called Duke, or Bruce, and I keep them well away from here. They brood and slouch against the lockers in the hallways of my high school. Sometimes they throw pebbles at my window late at night so that we can go make out under the lilac bushes beside the artificial lake in front of the Provincial Legislative Building.

  Democracy in action; checks and balances. They work vigorously at getting to second base, and I foil their moves like a fencer – there are conventions – until finally they ejaculate, you can hardly call it premature except that this whole thing is pretty premature, on my skirt. We sigh and breathe in the scent of lilacs that drifts headily down to us like a blessing and reminds us we are mortal, and tiny mauve blossoms settle on our faces.

  My sister has only two names, parental fatigue or failure of the imagination, and she too is known by her second name. Her first name is the name of my father’s young sister, dead at five when he was at university.

  Maybe she figures she was short-changed with two names to my three. I figure she wins, but my aristocratic homonym would explain her tendency to call me Princess. Witness the following.

  I am preparing to leave the luminous December skies of Sydney for Okotoks, informed of my mother’s ill hap and my father’s predicament, honouring a commitment made absent-mindedly years ago to my sister that I never dreamed would be called in.

  I feel she has strained for years, jumping again and again like a terrier, trying to see over the wall of their rejection. We’ve been disowned and disinherited. There’s no changing it, I say. When something bad happens to them, we’ll know soon enough and we’ll deal with it together.

  I don’t realise it at the time but when I say that, I imply I care. I imply there may be something to be salvaged. I misspeak.

  But I’m flying out anyhow. Blood calls to blood. What can I tell you?

  After I pick you up at the airport, my sister says on the phone, we’ll stop at the mall and rent two carpet steamers and do the whole house. She has just told me that her partner, a competent woman who would make short work of a houseful of carpet I am sure, is not coming to Okotoks with her. She’ll remain at home to run their business by herself for a few weeks.

  What an opportunity, my sister adds.

  Not one I want to take up, I say. I’m not coming for household maintenance. You’re probably not going to like it, but you’ll have to step away from the Windex when I’m around. I have chemical sensitivities, reactions to parabens. I know it’s boring.

  You’re such a princess, she says.

  I am not flying halfway around the world to extrude cat-pee from a Berber blend, I say. I will pay someone to do it, steam only, but it won’t be me. And it will cost. It’s like when you order a half-caf, low-fat, no-dairy cappuccino, hold the chocolate. It costs more the more you subtract, like you are paying for their brains to work backwards and adapt. Same for carpets.

  Ok, ok, she mutters. Princess.

  I land and walk down the concourse of Calgary airport with locals wearing shearling jackets and Stetsons, arms away from the body, wrists loose, like it’s high noon all day long.

  We drive to the shiny hospital where four days ago they tried to wire my mother’s crumbling bones together, doing their best but no warranty, no guarantee of workmanship; where three days ago my mother, emerging from the terrifying hinterland of anaesthetic to find her husband holding her hand, says to him things so brutal and of such piercing cruelty that even the nursing staff finally notice the old man weeping into his hands and send him home.

  It happens, they say. With older people. They come to, and a whole married life of disappointment and bitterness slips out, like an organ escaping an incision, like a balloon filled with acid. It bursts on impact, burning holes in their spouses’ clothing and leaving little round scars on their flesh that never heal completely. Come back in three days.

  So here we are.

  We advance three abreast down the kilometre of grey linoleum: my sister, me, and my father in a wheelchair pushed by a gentleman who seems to be my formerly-gregarious dad’s only friend, a local office-holder and fellow-campaigner for clean water, saddled by my parents with legal responsibility for all decisions concerning their welfare.

  We come down the home stretch of corridor to my mother’s room and a line of hospital personnel forms along the wall.

  A nurse steps out from the line and asks which of us is the famous author. Heads come forward like turtles’ so as not to miss a bon mot should somebody utter one. They wait for an answer.

  I look at my sister. What? I say. She has her face in her scarf, shaking like someone with ague. She gets a grip and hisses at me. You’re the one with plausible deniability. Just say something.

  Ok, I tell the nurse, here’s the thing. I write but nobody knows me. I am totally unknown, even among my friends. Actually, I don’t even write all that much anymore.

  The nurse claps her hands in delight and turns to the others. Now, she exclaims, isn’t that something!

  To me she says, that’s exactly how your mother told us you would react. You’re so modest; you will deny everything. She lets out a little shriek. So do I. Nobody moves.

  I could sign something if you like, I say, to break the silence. Oh, no, no, she says, emerging from her contemplation of me. We don’t want to detain you. And your mother is waiting. Just such a privilege.

  She sweeps the wide door to my mother’s room open and ushers us in.

  Chapter 4

  Which one are you? my father asks plaintively in those first days, at moments when I am alone with him, my sister somewhere else, polishing, spraying product on surface, rubbing, shining. Wax on, wax off.

  I don’t clean. My disinclination for this activity I call by various names: sloth, depression, boredom. It’s not that I dislike clean. I like it when it is done but I don’t want to do it. I don’t want anybody else to do it for me either. I make exceptions. I clean the toilet, I wash my clothes, but organised housecleaning is as foreign to me as saying a rosary.

  My parents’ house is not clean. Even by my standards, it is not clean. My sister arranges for a team of helpers, three in all, to come in. They will care for my father when we go back to where we came from, my sister and I. In the meantime, they will clean.

  The first one pitches in bravely when we show her the fridge. She is red-haired and childless, married, with animals. She was a local downhill ski champ in her youth, before life sat her down and layered pound after pound onto her wide farmgirl frame until she is winded by the effort of standing up. That plus the cigarettes.

  Dad skied too, decades ago. In unlikely fashion, they will bond.

  Hours later, that first day, she whacks the fridge door s
hut and says, You want blow by blow, or gist?

  Gist, my sister and I say in unison.

  Ok. At the back, nothing identifiable. It would take carbon dating. Had to sacrifice the crockery. Some sausages back there, those mothers were not coming unstuck.

  She peers at us for confirmation that she has done the right thing. We nod. It’s like Lord of the Fridge.

  Toward the middle, she continues, a delicatessen period, bad idea. Mayonnaise does not age well. Why grow your own penicillin when the pharmaceutical complex will do it for you? Anyhoo, she shakes her head, whatever.

  At the front, a semblance of normal, she says. Milk, eggs, butter, dated within living memory.

  She snaps her damp cleaning cloth. I saved what I could, she concludes.

  My sister is silent, maybe thinking about how she would have gone about the job otherwise. I step in.

  Thank you, I say with feeling. Please come back tomorrow. It will get better.

  Count on that, she says, and lumbers out carrying the black garbage bags she has filled up.

  Which one are you, my father asks me, affecting the crinkly twinkly blue-eyed pseudo-stern frown that served him well with the ladies in his youth.

  I’m the one from Australia, I say, opting for geography.

  You must tell me about the ashram sometime, he says.

  That’s not me, I say. That’s the other one.

  What’s an ashram anyway, he says.

  Not sure, Dad. You’ll need to ask the other one. I say her name for him, her present name. I do this because my sister changed what we were allowed to call her some years ago. She said that hearing her childhood name cast her back into the black chasms of before and we were not to do it.

  Your other daughter, Dad, I say.

  One day in a few months, when my sister and I are both back in our own homes, my father will sit in reflective mode with his helper and say, I have two daughters, you know.

  I know, she says. I know them. She is flicking through channels with the remote, looking for the baseball. She knows there may be a meltdown if she can’t find it. How about those Orioles.

  He repeats it. I have two daughters. I adopted them after the war. That gets her attention. You what? she says.

  Oh yes, he says. I adopted them. Sisters. And I hired a crazy woman to look after them. Had to get rid of her, eventually.

  Crazy as a loon, he says, turning his attention to the screen. Don’t have to worry about her anymore.

  The helper will report this to us on the phone, fondly, just proof for her of her employer’s encroaching dementia, which as it progresses, she hopes, will gradually make her the most important person in his life.

  I will reject this angrily when I hear it. In my books, she’ll be wrong.

  I won’t think, then or later, that he has dementia. His years will just be closing in on him, like the chutes the prairie cattle run through to get onto the trucks and then off the trucks and into the yard where they take their last free breath, the width of the chutes diminishing as they go, the last ones into the slaughter-house just wide enough for one – no choice but to go forward to the end and to go fast. Move along little doggie.

  Life, the extremity. That is what will ail my father.

  My sister will also react angrily to the careworker’s sharing of Dad’s remark, but for a different reason. She is angry that he said we were adopted.

  I remind her that when she was little, she told people she was adopted. She wanted to be adopted. It was not an unreasonable position to take, I say, but everyone laughed, because you look so much like Mum.

  He’s disowning us, she says, her voice steely down the line.

  Already done, remember, I say.

  Emotionally I mean, she says.

  I’m not comfortable telling people they’re wrong but I do it anyhow.

  You’re wrong, I say. He’s claiming us. He doesn’t want anything more to do with the crazy woman. He needs us but he can’t have us around if we are her daughters too. We’d be tainted, dangerous and untrustworthy. But if he adopted us, he chose us. We’re nothing to do with her. She can be, in his mind, just a seriously flawed childcare choice. He can live with that.

  My words won’t help much. My sister will stay mad. She will nurse this new grievance like a seedling.

  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’re not there yet. That’s weeks from now. For the moment we are poised to enter my mother’s hospital room, my sister and I, my father and his friend. My father may be casting about for confirmation of my identity and my sister’s, but my mother has used the 48 hours since the nurses sent everyone home while she calmed down to fine-tune the roles we will all play in her little hospital drama.

  She will be the devout mother, devoted to her wildly successful offspring who have flown incalculable distances to stand by her bed of pain.

  Praise the Lord, she cries, as we enter. I falter, wondering if we have the right room after all.

  She grasps my hand. You’re here, she says. Praise be. You aren’t too cold, she enquires, coming to this – she waves at the snowbanks outside her window – from where you were.

  No, I say. I’m fine.

  Kathmandu, I offer by way of explanation, meaning the shop where I bought thermal underclothing before I left home.

  She can’t know I mean that. She hears the word and infers some serious spiritual endurance training on my part. She turns a cold eye on me, assessing whether I have or do not have the chops to trump her surprising performance of piety with some more exotic ace of enlightenment.

  Deciding in the negative, she nods deeply. All paths lead, she says, eyes shining.

  Don’t they just, I say, studying my boots.

  Amen, says Dad’s friend.

  He has parked my father by the side of the bed. Dad sits there in his wheelchair like an old stork, his wispy hair electric from the touque he was wearing outside against the cold.

  He holds my mother’s hand, the one that isn’t gesturing. Her nails are split and ridged with age and from the chemicals she uses to do something to furniture, something she calls antiquing. He still has beautiful hands, long fingers with perfect, smooth oval nails.

  His eyes are bright as he looks at her, mute devotion to the moment that makes it all worth it – this moment when she holds the floor, radiating clarity and benevolence. People are silent around her, captivated. The moment when he can believe that whatever it costs, it is worth it to be enfolded in the aura.

  I look around. I am the only one not gazing at my mother. It occurs to me that she is a kind of flesh and blood pyramid scheme, a human Ponzi. You buy in and you are hooked. You have an investment in believing the projections, the evangelical 3D laser image of personal power and aggrandisement, this illusion of depth in thin air.

  I look at them and she looks at me. I know I am the only one who has liquidated the position, the only one to have taken the losses on the chin and sold up. It’s hard to be sure, but I think she knows it too.

  Chapter 5

  Meanwhile, back at the ranch, there are things to be seen to.

  I leave my sister, who has always worked in hospitals and is more than a match for the nurses and doctors with whom she confers, to discuss my mother’s bones and character with them. My father and I catch a ride back out to the country with his friend who, in the hospital parking lot, insists I should sit in the front so that I can see the view.

  It’s ok, I say, I used to live here. I have seen it.

  I don’t want him cramming my father into the back seat of his little two-door Italian job. I wonder if cars have changed since I lived here. Nobody used to drive low-budget Italian here – not heavy enough on ice, prone to seizing in the cold. You needed big American or German. A Ford would start at minus 40. So would a VW Beetle. A Fiat wouldn’t.

  He insists. It’s God’s country, he says, as though that clinches it.

  I look furtively around for cameras. Surely someone has set this God thing up and is filming
for the Salvation Channel on cable. While I hesitate, he begins stuffing my father into the back seat. Dad is diving in head first, doubled over and groaning slightly, propelled by the friend pushing his bum.

  There, he says once Dad is seated. He pulls the front passenger seat belt from the doorpost, yanking it behind the front seat and toward my father.

  What the heck, he says, giving sharp little tugs on the belt. Who designs these things! This won’t reach. Now, how are we supposed to attach your father?

  My father is rolling his eyes. I am for a moment unsure whether he is exasperated or losing consciousness. Either way, I think I would laugh if confusion didn’t seem to be descending upon us with the darkness.

  No matter, I say. Give me that one. I’ll use it. I point at the belt attached above Dad’s shoulder. Try that, I suggest. Maybe they got that one right.

  Could work, he says, and belts Dad in.

  When we have left the big freeway and are zipping down the darkening prairie roads, he waves his mitt across the windscreen and reiterates: God’s country.

  We roar like a sewing machine over the top of a hill and as we begin to careen down the die-straight two-laner, I see the Rockies. They shine, lit from behind where the sun has set, the snow covering them opalescent and a thin pearly band of sky above them holding the last of the light as the sapphire heavens deepen, the first star high above shining like a diamond on velvet.

  If Jesus had been born on a ranch, this is what the three wise cowboys would have seen. This is beauty you would follow where it took you, blindly, and it would take my breath away as it always has, if my knees were not jammed against my throat and we weren’t beginning to slip sideways down the road.

  My father groans. I sigh. This is no time for debate. The driver needs to concentrate on the road.

  So I cave, and resort to the most common form of Western conversational currency. Yup, I say. I clear my throat and say it louder. Yup.

  Fishermen standing motionless in icy streams will say this to each other after an hour or so of silence. And if, in late summer, you could sneak up on the two farmers standing in the ripening wheat, rubbing the heads of grain thoughtfully between finger and thumb, if you could creep between the dusty stalks among the grasshoppers, you would hear nothing but the rustling of the grain and the occasional yup.